 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
Game Master Will Wright changed the concept of video games with the Sims.Can he do it again with Spore? From The New Yorker In 1972, an engineer and former carnival barker named Nolan Bushnell stared a video-game company, in Santa Clara, California. As an engineering student at the University of Utah in the nineteen-sixties, Bushnell had become obsessed with an early computer game called Spacewar. The game's developers, a group of graduate students who were part of the Tech Model Railroad Club, at M.I.T., an early proving ground of computer hackers, had never considered selling the game; their idea was to demonstrate the appeal of interactivity, and to take a first small step toward simulating intelligent life on a computer. Bushnell's ambition was more worldly. He wanted to manufacture coin-operated game-playing machines and license them to amusement arcades. He foresaw a new kind of midway hustle, in which the hustler would hide inside the machine. "The things I had learned about getting you to spend a quarter on me in one of my midway games," he later said, "I put those sales pitches in my automated box." From this unlikely marriage—the computer lab and the carnival—the video game industry was born. Click here to read the rest of Game Master. (1mb pdf) Copyright (c) John Seabrook 2006. All rights reserved
Home | Books | Stories | Bio | Contact
|
 |